Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, (born June 21, 1839, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil—died September 29, 1908, Rio de Janeiro), Brazilian poet, novelist, and short-story writer, a classic master of Brazilian literature, whose art is rooted in the traditions of European culture and transcends the influence of Brazilian literary schools.

The son of a house painter of mixed black and Portuguese ancestry, he was raised, after his mother’s death, by a stepmother, also of mixed parentage. Sickly, epileptic, unprepossessing in appearance, and a stutterer, he found employment at the age of 17 as a printer’s apprentice and began to write in his spare time. Soon he was publishing stories, poems, and novels in the Romantic tradition.

By 1869 Machado was a typically successful Brazilian man of letters, comfortably provided for by a government position and happily married to a cultured woman, Carolina Augusta Xavier de Novais. In that year illness forced him to withdraw from his active career. He emerged from this temporary retreat with a new novel in a strikingly original style that marked a clear break with the literary conventions of the day. This was Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas (1881; “The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas”; Epitaph of a Small Winner, 1952), an eccentric first-person narrative with a flow of free association and digression. The “small winner,” Brás Cubas, cynically reviews his life in 160 short, often disconnected chapters.

Machado’s reputation of being among the greatest of Brazilian writers rests on this work, his short stories, and two later novels—Quincas borba (1891; Philosopher or Dog?, 1954) and his masterpiece, Dom Casmurro (1899; Eng. trans., 1953), a haunting and terrible journey into a mind warped by jealousy. Translations into English of his shorter fiction included The Devil’s Church, and Other Stories (1977), The Psychiatrist, and Other Stories (1963), A Chapter of Hats: Selected Stories (2008), and The Collected Stories of Machado de Assis (2018).

Urbane, aristocratic, cosmopolitan, aloof, and cynical, Machado used an indirect style in his fiction that could confound later scholars and critics attempting to determine his level of social engagement. One generation of critics might argue that he ignored such social questions as Brazilian independence and the abolition of slavery; a subsequent generation could find evidence of the opposite. His worldview tempered what might be called a “typical” contemporary Brazilian enthusiasm for local colour and self-conscious nationalism, but the locale of his fiction is usually a keenly observed Rio, which he took for granted as though there were no other place. The natural world is practically nonexistent in his work. His writing shows a deep-rooted pessimism and disillusionment that would be unbearable were it not disguised by flippancy and wit.

In 1896 Machado became the first president of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, and he held the office until his death.

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